Chapter 7
Burner lay on the north rock and did not move for a full minute.
Every instinct he owned was screaming at him to get up and go down there, and he pinned himself flat against the granite and would not let it happen, because a man who runs into a dark camp is a man who dies in it.
"Talk to me," Sable breathed.
"Wait."
He put the glasses up, which were useless in this dark and which he used anyway because the human eye picks up more through glass than people think.
Nothing.
No bodies in the yard. That was the first good thing. If twelve men had come through a sleeping camp there would be shapes on the ground and there were none.
The greenhouse glass was intact. Second good thing.
The container door was shut.
"The pipe," he said.
"What?"
"There's a signal. Three iron bars and a pipe to hit them with. The pipe hangs on a leather loop on the frame. It's on the ground."
"So somebody hit it."
"Or somebody knocked it off getting to it and didn't." Burner scanned the ground under the frame. "Either way, somebody touched it, and the camp is dark and quiet, and those two things do not go together."
"Unless they're all dead."
"They're not. There's no dead here. Look at the yard."
He made himself take the whole bowl in one piece the way he had taught eight people to do in four hours of daylight a week ago.
The south gap was open ground and empty.
The east rock, where he had built the false gap that funneled into forty feet of exposed ground under the north spur, was black.
The doghair lodgepole on the west, where he had strung two hundred feet of ankle wire, was black.
"Where would they come in?" Sable whispered.
"West. Through the doghair. It's the only side with cover all the way to the buildings." He was already moving his eyes there. "That's why I wired it."
"Then why is nothing on fire and nobody shouting?"
Burner stared down at the dark buildings and felt something turn over in his chest, slow, like a key.
"Because it worked," he said.
"What worked?"
"The drill." He let out a breath he had been holding for three miles. "The bars got hit. Everybody went to position. And the position for everyone who isn't shooting is inside, doors barred, lamps out, nobody moves, nobody makes a sound."
"So they're in the buildings."
"They're in the buildings. And Delacroix's behind the granite spur on the south and Priest is in the shutter slot in the second building and nine other people are lying behind rocks with instructions not to stand up for any reason on God's earth."
Burner's hands were shaking slightly and he made them stop.
"That's why it's quiet. It's supposed to be quiet."
"Then where are the twelve men?"
Burner looked at the west timber.
"That," he said, "is the only question there is."
They lay on the rock for eleven more minutes and watched.
At the end of the eleventh minute a shape moved in the doghair lodgepole at the western edge of the bowl.
Burner saw it because he had been staring at that exact stand of trees so long his eyes had gone unreliable, and then the shape moved again and resolved, and it was a man, low, working forward two yards at a time.
Then another, eight yards behind him.
Then a third.
"There," Sable breathed.
"I see them."
"How many?"
He counted. It took a long time because they were disciplined and they moved one at a time and they used every stump.
"Nine that I can see. There'll be two or three more behind them I can't."
"What are they doing?"
"They've been doing it for an hour," Burner said. "Look at where they are. That's ninety feet of progress in an hour. They're doing it right, they're doing it slow, and they're going to be at the edge of the open ground before first light."
"And then?"
"And then they come across forty yards of nothing at the buildings while everyone in the camp is lying in the dark waiting."
He put the glasses down.
"They hit the wire," he said. "That's what happened. One of them walked into my ankle wire two hours ago and the camp heard something or somebody on the rock saw something and hit the bars, and the twelve went flat and they've been crawling ever since."
"So the camp knows they're there."
"The camp knows something is there." Burner shook his head. "That's not the same. Halloran's got fifty people holding their breath in the dark waiting for something that may or may not be happening, and the longer nothing happens, the more of them start believing it was a deer."
Sable was quiet a second.
"How long will they hold?"
"Till dawn. Maybe."
"And these men know that."
"These men have been doing this for two years," Burner said. "Of course they know that."
He rolled onto his back and looked at the stars and thought as fast and as coldly as he had ever thought in his life.
"All right," he said. "Here's what's true. There's nine to twelve of them on the west side in the timber. They're between me and the camp. I can't get down there and through them, and if I tried, the first person to shoot at me would be Priest,
because he's got a slot in a shutter and orders to shoot anything moving in the open."
"So we don't go down."
"We don't go down."
"Then what?"
Burner looked west, past the doghair, up the long dark rise beyond it.
"The north bench," he said.
"What's on it?"
"A pile of dry pine slash about the size of a truck and a can of kerosene buried next to it."
Sable went very still.
"I built it a week ago," Burner said. "I told Halloran it was for signaling. That was half true."
"What's the other half?"
"They're in black timber in the dark and they can see the buildings and the buildings can't see them," Burner said.
"That's the whole advantage. Every bit of it. Take away the dark and they are twelve men lying in a stand of lodgepole with three hundred yards of nothing behind them and nine rifles in front of them."
"You want to light the mountain."
"I want to light them."
Sable turned her head and looked at the slope between the north rock and the bench.
"That's eight hundred yards," she said. "Downhill, then across, then up. On rock. In the dark."
"Six hundred. And there's a game trail under the lip that's out of sight from the timber the whole way."
"And when it goes up, every one of those men knows where it came from."
"Yes."
"They'll come for it."
"Yes."
Sable exhaled slowly through her teeth.
"How long to build the fire?"
"It's built. It's stacked and it's dry and the kerosene's in a can under a flat rock at the base. Four minutes with a match."
"And then what?"
"Then we're two people on an open bench with a fire behind us," Burner said, "and everything after that is improvisation."
She looked down at the camp, then back at him.
"Your dog," she said. "Can he be told to stay?"
"Why?"
"Because if he goes with us, he goes where we go, and where we're going is bad."
Burner looked at Yak, lying flat against the rock with his chin on his paws, ears forward at the timber.
"He goes where I go," he said. "That's not a thing I get a vote on anymore."
They went off the north rock at three in the morning.
The game trail under the lip was as bad as Sable had guessed and worse than Burner remembered, a foot wide in places with a fifty foot drop on the left and loose scree that moved under the boot.
They went down it in silence with their hands on the wall and Yak going ahead, and it took them twenty-five minutes to do four hundred yards.
Halfway across, Sable put her hand on his arm and stopped him.
Down below and to the left, well out from the timber, a man was walking in the open.
Burner went flat.
The man was alone. He was walking, not crawling, out from the western trees in a wide arc toward the south, and he was making no attempt to hide.
"What is he doing," Sable breathed.
"He's a stalking horse."
"A what?"
"He's walking in the open to make somebody shoot at him."
"That's suicide."
"It's suicide if somebody shoots." Burner's mouth was dry. "Watch him. He's not going toward the buildings. He's going across. He's giving them a nice slow target at about two hundred yards and every rifle up there is going to want it."
"And if somebody takes it?"
"Then twelve men know exactly how many shooters there are and where every one of them is, and the whole thing is over in four minutes."
They lay on the trail and watched the man walk.
He went eighty yards. A hundred. He stopped, once, and stood there in the open with his hands at his sides like a man waiting for a bus.
Burner found that he had stopped breathing.
Hold, he thought. Hold, hold, hold. Delacroix. Priest. Anybody. Hold.
Nobody shot.
The man stood there for a full thirty seconds and then turned and walked back the way he had come, unhurried, and the timber took him.
Sable let out a shuddering breath.
"They held," she said.
"They held."
"Your people held."
Burner put his forehead against the rock for a second.
"They held," he said again, and it came out wrong, and he got up and kept walking.
The north bench was flat and open and covered in frost-stiffened grass, and the slash pile sat at the lip of it exactly where he had built it.
He got the rock up and the kerosene can out while Sable lay at the edge and watched the timber.
"Four hundred yards from the lip to the nearest tree," she said.
"Three fifty."
"That's inside anybody's range."
"Yes."
"They'll have somebody good."
"They'll have four somebodies good," Burner said, "and I've been assuming that for a week."
He poured the kerosene through the pile, into the heart of it, into the bark and duff at the bottom, and he set the can twenty feet away because there was no sense in dying stupid.
Then he stood there with the matches in his hand.
"Sable."
"Yeah."
"Before I do this. There's a thing you should know and I'd rather say it now than after."
She turned.
"When this goes up, there's fifty people down there who are going to see twelve armed men in a stand of trees and start shooting," he said.